ND's Spiffy Hard-Soft Coloring Trick

(For Adobe Photoshop)

This tutorial will show you how I got the hard and
soft coloring that you can see in some of my more recent
Dragon
Shadows Images. This tutorial will work best for
you if you have allready read and understood my previous
Photoshop coloring tutorials ... or if you have a good
knowledge of Photoshop on your own!

The trick of this type of coloring is that all of your
flat colors must be on one layer.

Put your Photoshop Image together using a layer with
your inks (drawing) on top of a layer of flat, simple
colors on the characters and objects (colors). All of
this can go on top of a background if you desire.

Create
a layer for your soft shadowsjust
above your flat colors. Make sure that the blending
mode is set to "Multiply". Multiply means
that this layer will make everything below it darker.

Making sure that your "soft shadows" layer
is highlighted, go under your layer menu up top and
select the Group with Previous
option.

This basically means that it will only affect the layer
directly below it, and nothing else, thus it will only
show up on things that have flat color on them. All
of the transparent areas around the characters will
remain so. The soft shadows layer has no power to affect
them!

Select a single color and run some very simple, very
generic soft shadows across your image where you would
desire. Use a big "fuzzy" airbrush to do this.
Don't worry too much about detail. We'll be bringing
that out with our hard edged solid shadows later on!

I've used a light blue on my image - However, it doesn't
look that way! That's because of my "multiply"
layer setting. It will only darken things below it,
so even a light blue will show up as a darker shade
of the color that it is sitting on top of. I don't have
to worry too much about staying in the lines because
my layer is grouped! These two tiny steps before all
the shading will make things much easier and faster!

It's time for the hard shadows. By "hard"
I mean the solid, blocklike colors you see in cartoons
and animation, rather then the soft, gradiated, "real
life" type shadows.

Create a layer on top of your soft shadows layer. It's
blend mode should be set to multiply, and you should
repeat the layer menu "group with previous"
option.

Using a sharp edged paintbrush at 100% opacity, I
start filling in my hard shadows. It will look like
it's painting transparently because of the blend mode
"multiply", and once again, it will only darken
things below it, so it is safe to use a very light color
to shade everything.